Creating Custom Providers

A big advantage of the Membership Management and Role Management systems described in this chapter is the fact that you never directly touch the data source. You work exclusively with generic classes of the System.Web.Security namespace instead. To maintain the highest flexibility and to give you the option to integrate individual data sources, the system is based upon a provider model that you can expand as you desire.

Your new provider has only to support the IMembershipProvider IRoleProvider interfaces and be deposited in the web.config file. The members of both interfaces comply mostly with the already described APIs, because many calls are more or less handed over on a one-to-one basis to the provider.

This interface-oriented concept is currently being revised in favor of abstract classes. It's possible that there will be big changes with regard to the Beta version. For this reason, I won't include a detailed description for the implementation of custom providers.